US Indymedia Centers

Yahoo! News has reported that Boston's bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics has come to an end, after new mayor Marty Walsh declined to sign an agreement committing the city to cover cost overruns from the event.

Argentina is likely to default barring a last-minute breakthrough in negotiations with hold-outs or a court order. Argentina's grace period to pay bonds restructured after its 2001 default expires July 30th. Predatory funds and hold-outs may use court ruling to target Grenada and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

During the 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama expressed his intent to sign an executive order that would raise the minimum wage for new federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour. Though some very vocal pundits and politicians were outraged by the president’s decision to bypass the legislative branch to enact a wage hike, the executive order he wrote is limited to new contracts starting in 2015 and does not apply to contract renewals unless there are significant changes to the terms of the contract, such as the number of employees or type of work involved. The budget for federal contracts shrinks every year, decreasing the number of new contracts with it. So President Obama’s executive order will actually have very little impact. But the brazenness of a unilateral action to give the lowest-wage earners working for the federal government a little bump called attention to two issues that have been on the minds and placards of many in the past few years: poverty and inequality.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided not to take the landmark debt case between Argentina and bondholders led by NML Capital, a hedge fund that buys the debt of countries in financial crisis. Argentina is expected to file a second petition in the coming months that the Supreme Court will review and decide again if it will hear the case. In June, Argentina filed a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court asking the court to overturn a ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made last October. The ruling ordered Argentina to pay bondholders $1.33 billion based on the court’s interpretation of a pari passu, or parity clause.